Ms Rosie Ching, Senior Lecturer of Statistics at the School of Economics, has done SMU proud by winning the CEEMAN Champion Awards for Teaching.

She received the award at the 24th CEEMAN Annual Conference which took place in Estonia’s Tallinn School of Economics and Business Administration from 28-30 September.

CEEMAN (Central and East European Management Development Association) is an international management development association established in 1993 with the aim of accelerating the growth in quality of management development in central and eastern Europe. It has since grown into a global network of management development institutions interested in quality of education and innovations in this field, as well as in the broad area of subjects related to change, with more than 210 institutional and individual members from over 50 countries in Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Launched in 2010, the annual CEEMAN Champion Awards recognise and promote outstanding achievements of faculty, management, and staff associated with CEEMAN, in the categories of teaching, research, institutional management, and responsible management education.

Ms Ching said, “Winning the CEEMAN’s Champion Award for outstanding achievement by an individual faculty member in teaching sends such a strong message of endorsement which I feel so honoured by, that words are inadequate to fully describe my feelings. It is this award which has led me to tread my first steps in Europe and witness how deeply committed European institutions are in pursuing continual growth and innovation in their teaching. I owe a huge thank you to every teacher who has gone before me who showed me what true teaching really is.”

16 nominations from 13 institutions in 11 countries (Austria, Croatia, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Singapore, and Slovenia) were received for the various CEEMAN Champion Awards.

The jury studied a “live” video of Ms Ching’s class which included a detailed description of the many original developments, games and experiments, with very strong relevance to the learning needs of students, her official teaching evaluations as well as her contributions to SMU’s overall vision for education and potential transferability to other CEEMAN institutions.

This is not the first time that Ms Ching has won awards for her outstanding teaching. On 19 October 2016, Ms Ching won the Excellent Teacher Award (Undergraduate) at the annual SMU Teaching Excellence Awards.

She was lauded for effectively using interactive hands-on experiments, games, videos, current affairs and history to demystify statistics, engage students, and deepen their learning. She has proven to be extremely dedicated and caring, and goes the extra mile to support students’ cognitive and affective development. She also contributes actively to teaching and learning through developing innovative games, collaborates with peers on research, shares at faculty development events, and mentoring students on final year projects.

Ms Ching has also been placed on the SMU Teaching Excellence Honour Roll 2016. The Honour Roll has been introduced in 2016 to recognise faculty members who have received at least three SMU Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Awards.

[Caption: Ms Rosie Ching (right) received the CEEMAN Champion Awards for Teaching from Ms Olga Veligurska, Director of CEEMAN (left), and Ms Danica Purg, President of CEEMAN (centre)] (Photo: CEEMAN)